Rating: 
Summary: Not much help
Review: A complete waste of time and money. Negative 5 stars. This book contains no valuable subtance nor useful examples. More information is available from online help and web resources. It is poorly organized and doesn't fully cover the command syntax for someone familiar with other high-level languages moving over to VBA.
Rating:
Summary: Less than worthless.
Review: A complete waste of time and money. Negative 5 stars. This book contains no valuable subtance nor useful examples. More information is available from online help and web resources. It is poorly organized and doesn't fully cover the command syntax for someone familiar with other high-level languages moving over to VBA.
Rating: 
Summary: Very useful, and a great reference
Review: As someone who has been making a living writing Office macros for the past three years, I'd say this is the book I refer to most often. I taught myself Word VBA with this one book, after having briefly studied Excel VBA with SAMS Excel Programming (Podlin/Webb).Even now that I'm working in XP, the book is as useful as ever as a quick reference for solutions to common tasks, for descriptions of Word objects, and answers when "Help" is no help at all. It's certainly possible to learn Word VBA from zero with this book, but if you prefer a structured 'teach yourself' course with excercises, then you'd better get another book to go with this one. A good start might be Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Word 2000 Automation in 24 Hours.
Rating:
Summary: It Continues to Remain ¿Greek To Me¿
Review: Having read/studied "Writing Word Macros" authored by Steven Roman, I've been able to discern more accurately the meaning behind the phrase, "it's all Greek to me". If it was my intent upon having read through this manual to then be able to compose macros for the MSWord program, then the purchase of this manual was a serious waste of time, mental energy and money. I would hate to think that my life and/or my employment stability could be based upon what I was able to garner from having read this book from cover to cover. Needless to say, I would be simultaneously unemployed and "laid out" prior to either burial or cremation, at the funeral home of my choice. I am not more equipped to construct a simple [or complex] macro from having read through this manual than I would be able to submit a resume touting myself as a "rocket scientist." I believe that the author would have been more in keeping with what was expected of this manual if he had included more actual, usable examples and/or exercises. I haven't any greater idea as to how to actually apply what I've read to anything that even comes close to being practical with regard to the use of VBA or MSWord macros. I equate having read through "Writing Word Macros" with having initiated the reading of a novel or the watching of a motion picture with the thought in mind of seeing it through until the end in the hopes of, at the denouement, eventually enjoying the fact of it somehow coming together and making some semblance of understanding. I hesitate to even think of how "utterly in the dark" I would currently be had I not recently finished a 20 hour course on Visual Basics at my local community college. At this juncture, I would rather take my chances with one of the manuals alluded to by Mr. Roman in his introduction as "...very slow paced, primarily by padding them heavily with overblown examples and irrelevant anecdotes..." or one of the "monstrosities" that programming manuals are apt to be, and walk away having a sense of having learned something, than to have spent the time, energy and money on a book where the end result was simply and unequivocally "huh?" For me, from this point on, it's either a "Fill In The Blank for Dummies" or a third party, albeit monstrous tome, published by Que or Sybex. This is, without a doubt, my first and last purchase of any book either authored by Mr. Roman and/or published by O'Reilly Publishing.
Rating: 
Summary: Too little detail, too much padding
Review: I am a programmer and have been looking for a source to give me a heads up on VBA and Word macros. This book misses the mark. While I knew VBA was a subset of VB, I didn't realize that VBA was much closer to VB than a simple scripting language. While this isn't a bad thing, the first half of the book attempts to cram all the VB skills needed into small paragraphs. There is just enough detail to make a novice dangerous and frustrated. When I finally got to the meat of the book, the Word object, Roman states that he won't be going into it in detail, but only briefly. I bought the book just so I could find out about the Word object! Another item that becomes readily apparent is that Roman felt the need to bulk up the book by restating meaningless statistics at every opportunity. I easily read 5-6 times that there are 188 Word objects compared to Access' 51 (like it matters) or Excel's 184 (so what?). After stating it in paragraphs numerous times, he even shows a graph comparing the different applications objects. He also spends a good amount of time plugging other books he has written or software he has for sale. The book does contain enough detail to learn the basics of Word Macros, but if you're already a programmer, you probably wont get enough detail to satisfy you. If you are new to programming, you may get frustrated by the scant detail on the VBA language itself.
Rating:
Summary: This book was OK, but could be widened a bit.
Review: I found that this book was helpful, but only if I needed to write VBA macros within a word document. It would have been nice if it could have been expanded to show how to write the same macros external of a specific document and so could be used universally. Still, the author did in fact say that that was out of the scope of this book, so I really cannot complain too much. All in all, I found this book useful, especially for someone like me who's not very much into Visual Basic.
Rating: 
Summary: What are other reviewers reading?
Review: I just finished reading this book from cover to cover. I think it is excellent and I am wondering what the reviewers from Bothel and Sugar Hill read? I guess the reviewer from Sugar Hill must have read a different book, because he mentions that he bought the book to learn about the "Word object" and he says that Roman says he won't cover that object in detail. THERE IS NO WORD OBJECT IN THE WORD OBJECT MODEL and Roman does not say that there is (as far as I could tell). It's too bad that reviewers don't take a little more responsibility for accuracy before posting a review of someone else's work. How can we trust reviews otherwise?
Rating:
Summary: Superb book for those with some programming background
Review: I must admit that I'm a bit baffled by some of the other reviews I have read of this title. This is, quite frankly, a superb book -- although perhaps not suitable for absolute beginners. I have programmed in several other languages, but have only lately had the need to attack VBA for some projects at work, and found Word's online help frustratingly incomplete. This book's strength is that it complement's the online help and provides a deeper insight into how VBA "thinks." Other readers apparently were looking for more of a cookbook, with lots of full-figured, prewritten code, but I found that the code examples in the book, though short, provided *immediate* solutions to some problems I was facing in the code I was writing, and were sufficiently modular to be easily played-with and adapted to what I was doing. I also found another reviewer's accusation of bloat and padding in the book to be very much off the mark -- the density of useful information on a typical page of this book is much higher than in many computing titles I've read. Bottom line: anyone with some background coding in other languages, who finds themself in the position of having to solve problems in the Word macro environment, should snap this book up at the bargain price. [An added kudo for Amazon.com: I ordered this book (admittedly with second-day shipping) from Amazon.com on Thursday afternoon, and had it in my office the next morning. That excellent order-fulfillment performance proved particularly valuable for me on this go-round!]
Rating:
Summary: Review of Writing Word Macros
Review: I needed a book to carry me over from WordBasic to VBA. While the book was helpful, I found the examples woefully inadaquate. I, nor anyone else in my office, is writing a book, so the examples relating to writing 'this' book, seemed foreign. More examples of data selection and range manipulating would be more useful. However, the chapter covering tables was useful, and I refer to it often. I thought the book struggled with keeping elementary and advanced concepts seperate. I would not recommend this book for a first time macro user, but rather someone who has had some experience with Visual Basic or WordBasic.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a very good book
Review: I think the review from "A reader from Lawrenceville" got it right. It is not a good book. It is mostly a list of the various classes and their properties and methods. It can be useful for getting an overview, but it soon becomes tedious. It does not cover vital suff like Word application event handling. I suppose the only reason that it still sells is that all the other Word VBA books are out of print.
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